Smagin wrote again to wish her good health and a long life. He added in a barely legible postscript, I’d like to meet you one more time before I die . . . Was he ill or just gloomy? She decided not to reply.
One morning something happened to dampen the seasonal mood, a few minutes of friction reminiscent of so many in their youth, when Antosha seemed to belong more to his band of brothers than to Masha.
She entered the dining room to find Misha reading aloud a personal advertisement from the Moscow Record.
“‘Wishing to marry, there being no suitable brides in our area. I invite girls desiring matrimony to send their terms. The bride must be no older than twenty-three, blond, good-looking, of medium height and of lively, cheerful character; no dowry required.’”
He lowered the paper and grinned across the room at Antosha, who was just then pouring his coffee to take back to his study. Masha recognized their pranking tone, the matching glint in their pince-nez. The nascent joke they would be unable to resist.
“Don’t send that to her,” she told Misha.
“To whom?” Misha asked, feigning ignorance.
“Well, send it to Klara if you want. But not to Lika.”
Antosha said, “Klara will take the old man’s offer.”
Misha’s ears turned to petals on either side of his head. “Listen, you two. I may as well tell you now. I plan to propose to Klara next time I see her.”
“Wonderful,” said the older brother on his way out the door. “Maybe then you’ll move out.”
Once they were alone, Masha told Misha, “Don’t send it.”
“Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”
She muttered something assuaging to the poor ass. It was a foregone conclusion that Klara would refuse him. God help them if she didn’t.
Masha forgot all about the advertisement until a few days later when she noticed the Record folded on the parlour table and chanced to open it. A mutilated page hung down.
Misha was out in the barn. She had to dress to go after him, though her rage would have kept her sufficiently warm. Passing the earth closet, she heard whistling inside, and banging both fists on the door, she accused him through it.
“I didn’t!” the little brother roared back. In falsetto he added, “My tongue is not deceitful!”
She tramped around the house to Antosha’s study and, bracketing her eyes from the outside glare, peered in at him. He was writing but noticed her immediately. As soon as her expression registered, he shrank down.
She stamped inside the house and threw open his door. “Are you completely heartless?”
What a face looked back!
“When did you post it?” Masha asked.
“Yesterday. I’ll write to her, sister. Forgive me, but it was just too delicious not to send. She has a marvellous sense of humour. She’ll laugh, I know it. I love to hear her laugh. It’s better than church bells.”
“You know nothing,” Masha told him. “It astonishes me that you can write the things you do when you are completely incapable of understanding how other people feel.”
“Am I?” He shrugged. “Tell me what to do. I’ll do it at once.”
Though Masha saw his real need was to placate her, not Lika, she told him, “Get on the train. Go explain yourself in person. Apologize. She’s had enough letters from you.”
Act Four
1893–1896
Masha: What is the point of love without hope, of waiting whole years for something . . . one doesn’t know what. . . . But when I’m married there’ll be no time for love, new cares will drive out the old ones . . .
1
HOW STUPID. FARCICAL, IN FACT. HE RETURNED not the same day, but the next, and shut himself up in his office straightaway. Writing and tending to patients. Avoiding her.
Finally she burst in. Had he apologized for his cruel joke? Lika accepted, yes? Of course she would. Why did he tarry? Why had he stayed the night?
Antosha did something then he’d never done before, not with her at least. He placed his hands flat on the desk and leaned in. A more stable position from which to shout.
“What is it you want from me! What?”
For a moment Masha just stood there, stunned by his inexplicable anger and the vehement cant of his body. She opened her mouth. Nothing. She might have been trying to reply in a foreign language.
His fury soon fell away, leaving behind the rarest expression. It reminded her of when Lika had confronted him over “The Grasshopper.” Then he’d evinced regret, but this had to be . . . remorse? Yet he wasn’t offering it to her, his sister so hurt by his tone. His sister who had sent him to apologize, never thinking what form the apology would take.
Masha found her words. “You didn’t . . .”
The taciturn author was at a loss.
Sickened, she gathered up her disgust and left.
After she’d finished crying, she lay on her bed picturing the scene as his former amanuensis. Her handsome brother, scented handkerchief pressed to his nose, climbing the cat-reeking stairs to Lika’s flat. Granny answering his dutiful knock, the joy on her powdered face nothing compared to Lika’s when she heard who was at the door. Innocent Lika tearing out her curling papers and hastily dressing. A carriage ride, more teasing banter, dinner at the Hermitage Hotel. The obsequious waiter hovering, his hand earnestly pressed to his white linen breast.
“‘The stream was asleep. A soft flower, double-petalled on a tall stalk, touched my cheek—’”
Antosha cut him off. “Oysters, please.”
With a bow, the fawner stepped away.
Masha heard Antosha’s quiet, low-pitched voice, tender as those petals he wrote about. She smelled the sweet tinge on his breath. Not scent, but rot in his lungs.
“You do like oysters, Likusha?”
What Masha couldn’t hear, though she strained so hard to, was “I’m sorry.”
She should have known. Known that he would do the easier thing and take Lika upstairs to his room.
Masha’s imaginings stopped there, just short of Antosha’s capitulation and Lika’s eager submission.
IN THE NEW YEAR, WHEN SCHOOL RESUMED, LIKA seemed to be avoiding Masha too. The dark shadows around her silver eyes, rather than spoiling her looks, enhanced them—the gravitas of sleeplessness.
The first time they encountered each other in the hall after the break, Masha stiltedly asked how Lika’s Christmas had been. Lika chirped some platitudes, then moved along without asking about Masha’s, which would naturally include a mention of Antosha. Her reticence confirmed Masha’s fears. Unseemly to discuss a lover with his sister. Dunia had been the exception.
In the past, Masha had thought of these as the boring periods in Antosha’s affairs, after he lost interest and her friends withdrew in confusion, the shards of their hearts spilling out of their hands. Why had he so abruptly turned cold? They were unable to ask her. With no other subject of interest, poor Masha would be pelted with small talk for months. Then would come the inevitable confrontation, their faces rouged with anger. They were angry at her! Eventually, though, they accepted their dreams as bygone. Those who still wished Antosha in their lives reconciled with Masha.
This time, though, Masha felt that she was the one carrying the emotional burden, a soiled mound of it filling her arms, unwieldy and difficult to see beyond, as she stumbled toward the tubs. Instigator of the very thing she’d been trying to prevent, Masha accepted full responsibility for it. She felt as sorry for Lika as she’d felt for Olga that day at the hospital, though Lika would not end up like Olga, she was sure. Lika was beautiful and young, and soon this painful episode in her life would be thought of in the past tense too. But in the meantime, the present needed to be endured.
This intermission in their friendship left Masha bereft during those frigid months of winter. She longed to see the silly Lika who flapped her arms or snatched up a spoon and declared her love for it, not the subdued version ducking into her classroom to avoid talking to th
e sister of the man who’d bedded, then rejected, her.
Masha liked the Dairy School, so much so that she went despite how irregularly they paid her. Morning assembly, the rows of girls obedient out of sleepiness. The smell and sound of chalk. Cows returning to the courtyard at the end of the day in a clattering finale. She took pleasure too in female competence and dedication to a purpose beyond the reach of men. Most fulfilling were the moments when understanding bloomed on a girl’s face. Masha’s pupils were also her flowers, and she carefully tended each of them, making sure none felt the way she had in school. She didn’t even favour intelligence. The dimmer ones might later flourish just as well as those who could conjugate in French and recite the capitals of the world.
But now this painful awkwardness with Lika, coupled with Masha’s regret, spoiled these quotidian gratifications, which in winter were all she had.
At Melikhovo, Antosha tried to make amends. Not long after he lost his temper, he called her to his study where a stack of pages waited on his desk. At first Masha thought he was giving her something to copy, hoping to wind their relationship back to an earlier, better time.
It was indeed an overture, but not the one she thought. The manuscript was Vermicelli’s.
“Would you read it and tell me just how asinine it is?” he asked.
Masha took it. It was called New Ways of Achieving Piano Technique, and while some of these “new ways,” such as hanging weights from the wrists, seemed like corporal punishment, how was unmusical Masha to judge their efficacy?
When Masha told him this, he said, “She’s asked me to help her find a publisher. I just wondered how much of a laughingstock it will make me.”
A few weeks later, Masha received an effusive letter from Vermicelli about having her work accepted for publication in a performing arts journal. At last, a letter Masha could bring to him.
One glance and Antosha dismissed her thanks. It was nothing. Then he offered a rueful smile as though to say, See? I’m not such a monster. Not only did I help her, I didn’t even sleep with her.
Yet a tight bud of resentment stayed furled inside her. An October rose that might never open. Masha felt it whenever she looked at him.
SPRING CAME SLOWLY, THEN ALL AT ONCE, AS IT DOES IN Moscow, as though to forestall mass suicide. Masha stepped outside the school and felt the urge to unbutton her coat. Snow mould and the tang of new leaves sharp in her nose.
Lika stepped out behind her. Seemingly as taken aback as Masha, she pealed a nervous laugh. But then their mutual discomfort thawed too, and there was only relief. When Lika first came to the Dairy School, they used to leave together like this.
“I thought I’d take a walk in Sokolniki Park,” Masha said.
Lika heard the invitation in her voice.
Years before, Isaac had won a student prize for his painting of Sokolniki Park, a path edged by two ragged golden lines of fallen leaves, the sky a funnel above. Lika had never seen the painting or heard the story about it. Masha told her on the tram.
“Kolia complained to Isaac that the path was waiting for someone. Isaac left him alone with the picture. When he returned, Kolia had added a woman.”
Lika was sitting beside Masha, self-conscious again as soon as Isaac’s name came up.
“She was an afterthought,” she said sadly.
“Have you seen him?” Masha asked.
“Isaac? Yes. He’s well, or at least saner around me. He and Sophia are finally quits.”
She gave Masha a tentative sidelong look that seemed to say, Are we moving closer to our subject?
Not on the tram, Masha thought, and Lika nodded as though she’d heard it.
For the rest of the ride, Lika filled Masha in on the Moscow gossip. With the little brother still rarely in town, Masha barely knew what was going on. Sophia’s salon was now passé. Either “The Grasshopper” had tainted it, or Sophia and Isaac’s breakup had.
“I suppose no one wants to be seen in a parody,” Masha said.
Everyone went to the Hotel Louvre now, Lika told her. It was where Lidia Iavorskaya stayed.
Masha recognized the name. She was the Korsh Theatre actress famous for her flamboyant clothes and deep, rasping voice. Klara had mentioned her that day outside Muir and Mirrielees. Antosha associated with her, so said Klara, the papers and Misha. He’s running around with some actress.
The tram swayed to a stop and emptied out. Everyone had the same idea, to run headlong with arms outstretched into spring. Hats tucked under their arms, gloves stuffed in pockets, Lika and Masha walked closer than they had been sitting, along May Alley, toward the centre of the park, their pace quicker than those who had disembarked with them, a joint effort to leave listening ears behind. They would sort it out where only the trees could hear them.
Lika spotted something on the ground and stooped to pick it up. A feather with white and black striping on the vane. She stuck it in her hair, then carried on without a word, though she looked pleased when Masha laughed.
Masha said, “I’m sure Antosha told you that I sent him to you. You’ve been avoiding me. I don’t blame you for being angry.”
On Lika’s face—that familiar bloom of understanding. “Oh, Masha. I wish you’d spoken before! I’m not angry with you at all. I thought you were disappointed in me, or disgusted. I wasn’t sure.”
Masha stopped and faced Lika, not Kolia’s black-clad afterthought, but a blonde in a pale grey coat with the white of her blouse showing where her collar was open, a splayed hand on her chest. The ridiculous feather. Her open, honest face.
“He didn’t take advantage of me, Masha. I wanted to.”
She was defending Antosha. Masha sighed and began to walk on, unabsolved.
“Maybe you did want to go with him. But when a man takes a woman to the Hermitage and buys her wine and oysters, when the woman is giddy with love and champagne. Well . . .”
She looked back. Lika was pinching a cluster of catkins off a hazel bush.
“. . . the cards are stacked against the woman. She has to return the generosity in some way. This is particularly true if the man is older and successful and charming. Are you listening to me?”
Lika caught up carrying two sets of catkins. What was this crow game about? She wasn’t serious at all. Masha felt the urge to shake her, but knew that if she did, it would end another way, with Masha sobbing on her shoulder and confessing, “How I missed you, how I missed you, how I missed you.”
“He didn’t take me to the Hermitage, Masha. We went to the Hotel Louvre. To Lidia’s salon.”
Masha was looking in Lika’s face, but what she saw now was the scene she’d imagined after Antosha had shouted at her: the curling papers, the carriage ride, the obsequious waiter. But it all crumpled before her eyes.
“I’m not ruined, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Carefully, Lika draped a catkin over Masha’s right ear, another over the left. “That was no longer possible.”
They tickled her neck, these silly catkin earrings. Masha touched them on both sides. That was no longer possible? What did she mean by that? This was Lika’s trick. Masha recognized it now. To distract her after she’d said something troubling, like that time she’d had a coughing fit in Masha’s room.
“So you slept with Isaac too?” she asked straight out.
Lika’s mouth dropped open. At first it was hard to decipher the reason for her surprise. Masha sensed that her guess was both wrong and right. Right in that Lika had succumbed to Isaac, and wrong in that she hadn’t actually been alluding to him just now.
Lika began to cry. Her ungloved hands lifted to catch her sob. Masha, taken aback, reached out and drew Lika close, so her own body absorbed her quaking. One of the catkin earrings fell to the ground.
“What is it, Lika? What happened?”
“Nothing I care to talk about,” she managed to say as she came up for air. “I’m just happy we’re friends again. You always think the best of me, Masha.”
She didn’
t sound happy.
“I hope you’ll invite me again to Melikhovo. I honestly bear Antosha no hard feelings.”
MONTHS PASSED BEFORE MASHA DID INVITE HER. AS soon as laughing with Lika had been added back into the pleasure of her workday, Masha hesitated to upset the delicate equilibrium of their reconciliation. Hesitated, too, to question her about what she’d said that day in Sokolniki Park. Behind her words lurked something that could not be politely—or safely—approached, not even with the utmost delicacy.
2
THEIR VEGETABLE KINGDOM WAS EVEN MORE resplendent that summer, their second at Melikhovo. And there were additions to their animal one—two dachshund puppies, a brother and sister, upon whom Antosha bestowed medicinal names, Bromine and Quinine.
The human news was mixed. Mother had three teeth pulled and consequently developed the habit of sucking her lip into the gap, which drove Masha around the bend. Misha finally returned to the tax department, but to the office in a nearby town, convenient to Melikhovo. He had indeed got himself engaged to Klara, to Masha’s horror, but then was jilted so ignominiously that even Antosha, increasingly annoyed by his freeloading, felt sorry for him.
It happened like this: Klara was supposed to have spent Easter with them, but unexpectedly wrote to say she couldn’t come. Weeks passed without a letter, until Misha, naturally concerned, took himself off to Moscow. He arrived to find her house packed with wedding guests.
“Who’s getting married?” he stupidly asked.
Klara.
He hightailed it back to the station. For many glum weeks, he pored over her letters, showing them to the family, begging them to find hints of her treachery.
A Russian Sister Page 24